Connected customers are customers that love your brand. They buy from you again and again, they spend more on your website, and they serve as brand advocates within their networks. The connected customer is eager to engage across multiple channels and devices. In the online marketplace, the connected customer provides the straightest path to success, paying dividends across the entire customer lifecycle.

You can’t ignore the growing prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) in today’s retail landscape. According to IDC, 40 percent of retailers will have developed a customer experience architecture supported by an AI layer by 2019. Will your business be one of them? Retailers that fail to incorporate an AI-backed solution into their business strategies will face myriad consequences that can severely affect their bottom line.

Consumer perceptions of gender balances in AI

The increasing use of AI, and specifically conversational AI such as Alexa, Siri, and Google, has posed many questions.

Why do all the conversational AI interfaces default to women’s voices? Will the continued use of AI carry with it the gender stereotyping and historical baggage of the last 30 years, when women in technology were largely marginalized? What does this new paradigm mean for both women and the representation of women in the field of technology? And are consumers attuned to these developments?

The Internet fundamentally changed the very nature of commerce. It was easy to see the appeal of online shopping when we started building websites in the 1990s: It was much more convenient than visiting a physical store. In the years since, retailers have watched statistics steadily climb as people make more of their purchases directly through digital channels. The latest proliferation of connected devices and improved technology platforms have served to only feed these numbers, and brands, in turn, are rethinking their marketing strategies to meet consumers’ needs.

Conversational interfaces like messaging apps have become the default way consumers connect with each other. Compared to voice, they’re used as much as 90% of the time.

The realisation of these consumer preferences, coupled with a growing appetite for new technologies, has led to the rise of conversational commerce — and an industry of people focused on the design, development, creation, and management of conversational interfaces, including the bot and human agents behind them.

Millennials (18–34 years old) are one of the most impactful groups of consumers globally. This generation is estimated to grow fourfold, to account for 50% of Australia’s population by 2030. In customer service and brand experience, these consumers have high expectations and low tolerance. They are more likely to switch to a competitor brand if their preferred brand provided poor customer service.

You may not know me or even my company, LivePerson, but you’ve certainly used my invention. In 1995, I came up with the technology for those chat windows that pop up on websites. Today, more than 18,000 companies around the world, including big-name brands like T-Mobile, American Express, Citibank and Nike, use our software to communicate with their millions of customers. Unlike most startup founders who saw the birth of the internet in the mid-1990s, I am still CEO of my company.